After lunch at a local restaurant in the Teide Parque Nacionale, we headed for La Playa de las
Américas. This relatively long drive saw us leave under a blue sky and traverse lava fields into forested land. The sky turned grey, the fog rolled in and the temperature dropped once more.
The drive was basically one extremely long descent. It would have been fantastic on a bike, requiring a single kick of the pedals to for a ride lasting the better part of an hour, I imagine.
As we descended towards the coast, grey skies quickly made way for blue once more. The temperature rose en route from 5°C to 20.5°C, thereby adapting to our too general expectations.
As we neared the hotel, the scale of the south of the island’s concessions to tourism became
abundantly clear. Restaurants advertising authentic cuisine from every corner of the earth sprang into view, the olive complexion of the locals gave way to the lobster and beetroot hues the northern European tourist, and the evidence of unbridled hotel construction was all around us.
This part of Tenerife is the reason most people come to the island: sand, sea, sangria and sex. You can keep the sangria.
The touristic south exists in stark contrast to the relatively unspoilt and tourist-deprived north. In Santa Cruz and La Laguna, we found very few people who could speak English. Whilst this made menus tricky, it was fun for me to practise my Spanish.
In the south, however, the waitress is only slightly more likely to speak Spanish than the customer. There are a lot of expats here.
At check-in in our hotel, we were treated to a glass of champagne each; which, in effect, meant that Sarah got two glasses. Eloïse was given crayons and something to colour. Clearly, this place was orientated towards families and wanted to foster that feeling of being on holiday, right from the start. No complaints here.
The woman who checked us in turned out to be Dutch, although her complexion and heavily Spanish-accented Dutch had me thinking she was a Spaniard who had spent some time in the
Netherlands. Not so. She told me that, after seven years in Spain, she now struggles even when calling her mother on the phone.
Eloïse’s first day on the beach was certainly her favourite to date. She beamed from ear to
ear as she ran across the sand, dipping in and out of the chilly sea as the waves lapped at her legs.
Further up the beach, oily, obese women with pedulous tits rose from their beach towels and prised themselves into altogether overoptimistic swimwear. Their gigantic breasts heaved and sagged like slabs of sausage meat wrapped in polythene.
After our fun at the beach, we went in search of food. There’s certainly no shortage of places to eat, but the trick was in finding one whose ambience suggested the slightest chance of a decent meal. You can’t just go on a full dining-room, because most of the customers are eating there for the first time. Restaurants in areas like this, saturated with tourists, don’t have to care about receiving repeat custom.
An Italian establishment eventually received our blessing and served surprisingly good food.
Ironically, possibly the hardest type of restaurant to find around these parts is an authentic Spanish eatery. Mongolian barbecue? No problem. Decent tapas? Good luck.
Most of the restaurants along the seafront advertise that they sprechen Deutsch. Others hang out the Swedish or Norwegian flag to indicate the owner’s nationality and the type of cuisine served. And, of course, there’s no shortage of places offering a good old English fry-up, with or without a TV set serving images of 22 grown men trying to kick a ball into a net and kissing each other.
I hadn’t been to Spain since 1988, if I remember correctly, and this part of Tenerife is strongly reminiscent of my memories of the Costa del Sol: garish signs, uninspired architecture, tacky decor, mediocre food and thousands upon thousands of budding skin cancer victims.
Basically, this kind of place caters to people who would rather stay at home. To them, a holiday abroad is a begrudged necessity for the sake of good weather. All the bad food and warm beer you can get down your neck, but now served at the edge of a sandy beach, under a radiant orb. A home from home.
In spite of my sneering, we enjoyed our stay in this tacky resort. Eloïse has never had so much fun on the beach. We bought her a bucket and spade and she built a multitude of sand castles. We found starfish in the water, as well as other kinds of fish, and picked up shells along the shore.
On top of that, our hotel’s breakfast spread was truly fabulous, which always helps, and more than made up for the toe-curling evening piano-bar crooning that had us cringing in our room. One of the waiters took a real shine to Lucas and chatted with him at every opportunity. “¿ Luca, que pasa, Luca?” he asked with a big grin. Lucas always laughed back at him.
Lucas, too, enjoyed what was his first experience.of the beach. He crawled around and dug in the sand, occasionally planting his face in it and no doubt eating some. He seemed to love it.
Every third person in the southern resort area seems to be a Swede or a Norwegian. It’s amazing just how many of them there are. Scandinavia must be half-empty at this time of year. Imagine how many of them there’d be if there weren’t some kind of slowdown-turndown-credit-crunch-crisis thing going on.